Current Developments in Morocco

Morocco has developed an ambitious strategy, dubbed "Vision 2010", aimed at attracting 10 million tourists a year by 2010. This strategy provides for creating an additional 160,000 hotel beds, bringing the national capacity to 230,000. It also aims to create 600,000 new jobs to assist in improving employment levels. There are six key areas identified in the broader Azur Plan, focusing on large scale development sites, predominantly located on the coastline, with contracts already awarded to international developers.

The Moroccan Government is heavily investing in tourism covering many different aspects of the associated infrastructure, and is aimed at increasing the proportion of Morocco’s GDP which is accounted for by tourism to 20%.

Despite the global economic crisis, Morocco's tourism industry is doing well. Eight million tourists visited the country in 2008, a 7% growth compared to 2007.

The most important source market for Morocco was France, with 2.6 million visitors. Spain was second, with 1.43mn, followed by Belgium (392,000), the UK (387,000), Italy (333,000) the Netherlands (325,000) and Germany (182,000). Tourism receipts for the January to November period injected US$6.6bn into the economy.

Despite the growth of the sector the Ministry of Tourism has drafted a new plan to protect the Moroccan tourism sector from the effects of the global economic crisis, especially in consideration of The World Tourism Organisation (WTO) forecasts that growth in global demand for tourism in 2009 could be between 0% and -2%,  compared with 2% growth in 2008.

The new plan called CAP 2009 is aimed at keeping Morocco attractive to tourists, new strategic measures have been adopted to anticipate and limit the impact of the global financial and economic situation on the sector and essentially update the vision 2010 approach.

The tourism sector is Morocco's primary foreign currency earner and main employer after the labour-intensive agricultural and the textile industries. It is also the country's main attraction for foreign investment, with high-profile real estate and tourism projects financed by Arab Gulf investors worth some $20 billion.